The present invention relates to spread-spectrum communications and more particularly to a method and apparatus for enhancing communications by using phased array principles for increasing signal-to-noise ratio for a spread spectrum signal with multipath arriving at a receiver.
Achieving sufficient signal strength when a received signal comes from two paths is a problem when communicating with spread-spectrum modulation in a multipath environment. The received signal from the two paths may have phase cancellation, yielding no reception, or reception with an unacceptable error rate.
Phased arrays, as is well known in the art, require N antenna elements for distinguishing up to N−1 signals arriving at the phased array from different paths or directions. This concept of spatial diversity is well developed in antenna theory.